440 IRRIGATION IlSr EGYPT. 



The fields of Egypt are more regularly watered than those of 

 any other country bordering on the Mediterranean, except the 

 rice-grounds in Italy, and perhaps the marGite or winter meadows 

 of Lombardy ; but irrigation is more or less employed through- 

 out almost the entire basin of that sea, and is everywhere attend- 

 ed with eflPects which, if less in degree, are analogous in char 

 acter, to those resulting from it in Egypt. 



There are few things in European husbandry which surprise 

 Enghsh or American observers so much as the extent to which 

 irrigation is employed in agriculture, and that, too, on soils, and 

 with a temperature, where their own experience would have led 

 them to suppose it would be injurious to vegetation rather than 

 beneficial to it.* In Switzerland, for example, grass-grounds on 



short, they created a region of culture most rich in historical monuments. " — 

 Einleitung zur allgemeinen vergleichenden Geographie, pp. 165, 166. 



This view seems to me highly improbable ; for great rivers, in warm cli- 

 mates, are seldom if ever bordered by sandy plains. A small stream may be 

 swallowed up by sands, but if the volume of water is too large to be carried 

 off by evaporation or drunk up by absorption, it saturates its banks with 

 moisture, and unless resisted by art, converts them into marshes covered with 

 aquatic vegetation. By canals and embankments, man has done much to 

 modify the natural distribution of the waters of the Nile ; yet the annual in- 

 undation is not his work, and the river must have overflowed its banks and 

 carried spontaneous vegetation with its waters, as well before as since Egypt 

 was first occupied by the human family. There is, indeed, some reason to 

 suppose that man lived upon the banks of the Nile when its channel was much 

 lower, and the spread of its inundations much narrower, than at present ; but 

 wherever its flood reached, there the forest would propagate itself, and its 

 shores would certainly have been morasses rather than sands. 



The opinions of Ritter on this subject are not only improbable, but they are 

 contradictory to the little historical testimony we possess. Herodotus informs 

 us in Euterpe that except the province of Thebes, all Egypt, that is to say, the 

 whole of the Delta and of middle Egypt extending to Hermopolis Magna in 

 N. L. 27° 45', was originally a morass. This morass was doubtless in great 

 part covered with trees, and hence, in the most ancient hieroglyphical records, 

 a tree is the sign for the cultivable land between the desert and the channel of 

 the Nile. In all probability, the real change effected by human art in the 

 superficial geography of Egypt, is the conversion of pools and marshes into 

 dry land, by a system of transverse dikes, which compelled the flood-water to 

 deposit its sediment on the banks of the river instead of carrying it to the sea. 

 The colmate of modern Italy were thus anticipated in ancient Egypt. 



* For a remarkable case of successful irrigation, in Vermont, with water at 

 little above the freezing point, see Report of XT. S. Department of Agriculturot 

 for 1868, p. 580. 



